As children copy their fathers you, as God’s
children, are to copy Him. Live your lives in love–the same sort of love which
Christ gives us and which He perfectly expressed when He gave Himself up for us
in sacrifice to God. Ephesians 5:1-2
I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in
general but for just so much self-knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use
at the moment, the little daily dose.
Have we any reason to suppose that total
self-knowledge, if it were given us, would be for our good? Children and fools,
we are told, should never look at half-done work; and we are not yet, I trust
even half-done. You and I wouldn’t, at all stages, think it wise to tell a
pupil exactly what we thought of his quality. It is much more important that he
should know what to do next.
Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
So
I am teaching fourteen-year-olds literary analysis, line by line.
And
they all have a long way to go. But man, after I give my little song and dance
about citation, and blending the explanation smoothly with four to seven words
of the text, and quotation marks around the exact words, and the page number
and only the page number inside parenthesis and then closing punctuation, there
is a veritable ocean full of swaying seaweed arms vying for not only my
attention, but my approval.
And one hardly knows where to begin, with redundant adverbs, awkward word choice, and
myriad misplaced apostrophes, but there are always the gleaming nuggets of
progress to be picked up, examined and noticed with a broad smile.
And
to be given the next step.
Yesterday
I saw a picture of Dustin in his father’s arms. And my goodness, the tilt of
the brow, the mass of blonde curls and the round, so very round eyes are
identical to those of my beloved Everette. She is her father’s child without
the tiniest chill of doubt.
But
no matter how very clever is my beloved Everette, she is not about to crawl
under the trailer of an indigent woman and replace the sewage
line. And although I am thrilled with her new words, “up” and “down” that I
taught her Thursday, lifting her way, way up and way, way down, over and over,
those are no where near the profundity of Mr. Eloquent Schaber. But that does not takes away from the huge strides she has made from her grunts and flailing
of just last week.
And
we are to copy Him–in love–the same sort of love that Christ perfectly
expressed when He gave Himself up for us in sacrifice to God. While we were yet
sinners, Christ died for us.
He
then took a little child, whom set him among them and embraced, and he said to
them, ‘Anyone who welcomes a little child such as this in my name, welcomes me;
and anyone who welcomes me, welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’ Mark 9:36–37
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